Contents

These numbers are a rough guide to how these labels are applied. Contributions during the most recent three months have been selected as one of the criteria for assigning an "activity level": Out of ≈ 26,100 editors who left their mark on Conservapedia, 337 did so over the last three months, showing various degrees of activity:

In March 2011, we find this little exchange on Conservapedia's main talk page:

Wikipdedia Fails to Retain Editors

Wikipedia just admitted that its retention rate for editors has dropped from 40% to 12%. See: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update . What they won't admit is that they have allowed politicized cabals to systematically drive off any editors that don't agree with their ultra-liberal world view! Fongman 12:14, 12 March 2011 (EST)

Has anyone here worked out statistics like this for Conservapedia? What is our editor retention rate? --DanN 15:25, 12 March 2011 (EST)

Don't have a numeric answer, but based on experience our retention rate of quality editors is quite high. For example, there were three quality editors who registered at Conservapedia at the very beginning of the massive publicity in February 2007. Two of those three (none of whom I have ever met personally) are still frequent editors today.--Andy Schlafly 17:11, 12 March 2011 (EST)

Wow, I suspect that CP's 67% rate is higher that Wikipedia had even in its heyday! --DanN 18:17, 12 March 2011 (EST)

This gave rise to a little news bit on the main page:

A visitor here posts that "Wikipedia just admitted that its retention rate for editors has dropped from 40% to 12%.[1]What they won't admit is that they have allowed politicized cabals to systematically drive off any editors that don't agree with their ultra-liberal world view!"

Isn't that amazing? The Wikimedia Foundation undertakes a research to better understand the internal dynamics of our communities, publishing hundreds of pages of data, diagrams and conclusions, while Andrew Schlafly is able to identify the inherent problems in a single sentence. So would it help Wikimedia to get rid of its politicized cabals? Let's have a look at the data for Conservapedia, which is absolutely free of an ultra-liberal world view!

For the scope of this survey, we use the definitions of Wikimedia's research project, especially:

Active editors refers to registered users who have made five or more edits in the previous month. [...]

Very active editors refers to people who have made 100+ edits in the previous months. Very active editors are a subset of active editors.

New Wikipedians refers to people who have made their 10th edit in a given month. (So, a person who makes their 10th edit in January 2011 would be considered a New Wikpedian in January, but would cease being one in February)

The term new Conservapedian or new editor will be used analogously.

Let's first have a look at the data from August 2009 until July 2010 (taken from Wikimedia's Editor Trends Study):

All Wikipedias

Conservapedia

New Editors

Active editors(> 5 e/mo)

Very active editors(> 100 e/mo)

New Editors

Active editors(> 5 e/mo)

Very active editors(> 100 e/mo)

Jul-10

15,380

81,474

10,411

28

98

14

Jun-10

16,143

83,087

10,574

38

116

9

May-10

18,339

88,465

11,115

46

156

9

Apr-10

17,861

86,577

10,871

34

106

14

Mar-10

19,276

90,024

11,224

24

94

16

Feb-10

17,823

85,610

10,747

26

108

14

Jan-10

19,481

90,758

11,475

53

139

15

Dec-09

17,469

84,478

10,443

65

209

25

Nov-09

18,155

86,328

10,510

40

135

18

Oct-09

18,687

86,793

10,836

41

170

17

Sep-09

17,474

84,575

10,834

27

99

13

Aug-09

18,791

87,456

11,103

15

76

13

See how the Wikipedias are failing, while Conservapedia is blooming? But let's have a look at the retention rate. We were informed that Wikipedia's rate dropped to a meager 12%. At the same time, Conservapedia's rate raise to an astonishing 7.5% To make the difference even more obvious, the same scales are used in these diagrams, showing the retention rates and the number of active editors at the Wikipedias and Conservapedia:

en.wikipedia.org

Conservapedia

But perhaps this isn't such a great idea, here another pic for Conservapdia, where the scale for active editors is inflated by the factor 100...

Conservapedia

RationalWiki

(the high retention rate at RationalWiki indicates that it is one of the most conservative wikis...)

For short: Wikipedia's failure to retain its editors is something Conservapedia can only dream of. But perhaps wikipedia should try Andrew Schlafly's approach and define an entity called quality editor: an editor who is likely to stay around. That would improve the retention rate of quality editors dramatically.

Conservapedia's own page statistics includes an entry active users. Those are defined as users who have performed an action in the last 7 days, while at the similar page at Wikipedia, this period is set for 30 days.
For instance, on June 6th, 2009, Conservapedia counted 165 active users, while Wikipedia had 158,605.
Calculating these numbers for both time periods yields this graph - though, for the graph only those users are counted which made at least one edit, and not only performed blocks, etc.

On a first glance, Conservapedia seems to attract twice at many active editors than RationalWiki. But if you take only those editors into account who aren't blocked, the situation changes dramatically: Then RationalWiki (having virtually no blocked members) takes the lead.

It is a new day for Conservapedia which has evolved into a series of special interest fiefdoms with virtually no collaboration.
The most active user is "TheAmericanRedoubt" (TAR) who began to edit on March 27, 2014. TAR went into high gear in December creating many categories and see also sections in existing articles and promising extensive new coverage in the areas of: guns, survivalism, alternative medicine, and gardening. When other editors noted his disruption of the existing category system and his complete failure to follow the Manual of Style, he went after SamHB, PhilH, AugustO and Wschact. He also got into confrontations with JoeyJ and AlanE. TAR resigned twice in protest and was asked back by Conservative. He then took an unexplained wikibreak from Jan 27 to Feb 9, held a phone conference with Andy, and is now back creating whatever he wishes. His edit counts (8,178 edits in the last 91 days) far exceed all others combined, which makes him indispensible to Andy.

User(s) "Conservative" is an admin who focuses on creating a large number of articles dealing with Athetists and Evolutionists. He has been known for his marathon editing sessions and claims to be an account operated by a number of people. He operates at least two known sockpuppets. (5,783 edits)

Site owner "Aschlafly" is an admin who has edited 724 times in the last 91 days.

User "JoeyJ" does a lot of vandalism patrolling. (653 edits)

User "VargasMilan" is an active editor. (608 edits)

User "Wschact" is currently blocked but posted mostly about Wikipedia-related topics. (519 edits)

User "Karajou" is an admin who largely does vandalism blocking and check user studies. He also writes about birds. (508 edits)

User "AugustO" has been active in the Conservative Bible Project. (498 edits)

User "PeterKa" is a blocked Wikipedian who is editing history and politics while his block is pending. (421 edits)

User "AlanE" edits in the area of history and appears to be from Australia. (207 edits)